Dwelling In / On The Periphery by Roy Cloutier

Dwelling In / On the Periphery Eleven Theses Toward The Convivial City UBC SALA | Chandigarh Research Studio, 2017 Edited by Roy Cloutier & Nicole Sylvia

Dwelling In / On the Periphery Eleven Theses Toward The Convivial City

Chandigarh Research Studio, 2017 School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia Editors Roy Cloutier & Nicole Sylvia Adjunct Professors, University of British Columbia Students Patrick Birch Mitchell Gray Tori Hamatani Pera Hardy FĂŠlix Lalonde Lavergne Gabriel Lacombe Josh Potvin Blaire Schille Anna Thomas Caleb Westerby Trevor Whitten

Contents

01_

Introduction: Toward a Convivial ‘Smart City’

02_

Conceptual Research New Territorial Forms of the City The Social Landscape of Bypass Urbanism Control and the Smart City Smar t / Bypass / Peri-Urbanism in Chandigarh

13 15 39 57 77

03_

Theses on the Convivial City The Productive Periphery Pera Hardy The Periphery and the Museum-City Trevor Whitten Atoll Urbanism Patrick Birch Collective Agency Félix Lalonde Lavergne [R]urban Josh Potvin Facilitating Forms Blaire Schille Open Park Tori Hamatani Smart Inclusion Mitchell Gray Toward a Waste Urbanism Anna Thomas Curious Mixtures Caleb Westerby Reinventing the Grid Gabriel Lacombe

91 93 115 129 141 151 165 179 195 203 215 225

04_

Postscript and Acknowledgments

241

01_ Introduction

Toward a Convivial ‘Smart City’ Roy Cloutier & Nicole Sylvia

Dwelling in/on the Periphery is a research and design program examining contemporary urban dynamics in India, particularly as precipitated by the Modi government’s Smart Cities initiative. It questions the dominant urban and architectural models adopted by Smart Cities advocates, studying them through dual lenses: on one hand, critical geography, on the other, architectural process, representation, and speculation. For a variety of reasons both historical and geographic, discourse on Smart Cities in India has dramatically overemphasized centralized forms of control and management—in turn leading to mutated spatial manifestations and circumscribed social potentials. In this context, the argument of the studio is for a re-wiring of the dominant spatialities of the Smart City: decoupling it from the top-down, deterministic urban models on which it is so often predicated and fundamentally inverting the relationship between subject and city. The studio examines these emerging patterns of urbanism from the inside out—accepting the concerns of the Smart City while questioning, pluralizing, and ultimately radically remaking the processes by which it takes form and evolves over time. In this sense, as urban theorist Neil Brenner asks, “[i]f the traditional city is dissolving, and urbanization is being generalized across the planet, can new forms of citizenship be constructed that empower people collectively to appropriate, transform, and reshape the common space of the world?” 1 While Brenner largely approaches the question of agency on the level of policy, this studio posits that the core of the answer lies within the realm of architecture, or rather, of building (understood as a verb, and thus extending far beyond both architecture and architects as traditionally understood)— specifically, in the processes of entanglement, engagement, and production by which the built environment comes to exist. In turn, the research is both analytic and speculative—using the elaboration of alternative forms for the (smart) city as an opportunity to reconsider the role of architectural agency in the production of the city.

New Geographies of Urbanization in India Propelled by the logistics-lubricated fluidity of the contemporary global economy, novel forms of urbanization have begun to spread across both global North and South. ‘The city’ as historically conceived is at once exploding and imploding, to borrow a metaphor from Henri Lefebvre. On one hand, urbanization is expanding rapidly across the hinterlands between mega-cities, stretching inherited definitions of ‘city’ and ‘urban’ much as it stretches outward geographically to form novel conurbations at immense scales. On the other hand, ‘the city’—understood as a coherent political unit, open and accessible, acting as a site of exchange across difference—has splintered inward, becoming fragmented and atomized, largely supplanted in much contemporary urban policy by a reliance on an exclusionary, mono-functional urban model largely derived from special economic zones. These two trends coincide and reach their clearest expression in the territorial ambitions of the Modi government’s Smar t Cities Mission, which seeks to construct one hundred ‘world class’ cities between and atop India’s existing urban centres. The dramatic geographic transformations at play in the Smart Cities programme point toward a new model of urbanism—one with a series of commensurate ideological and cultural shifts, institutional reorganizations, and social implications. Yet the urban ambitions of the Smart Cities programme remain largely relegated to more-or-less hermetic enclaves on the peripheries of existing cities—raising many of the same issues posed by the ‘blank slate’ emphasis of the initial plan in terms of access, equity, and inclusion. As urban researchers have thoroughly documented—from Graham and Marvin’s seminal 2001 book Splintering Urbanism to Bhattacharya and Sanyal’s more recent criticism of Indian ‘bypass urbanism’—zone-based models lend themselves to an erosion of public services, an exacerbation of inequality of access to infrastructure, and ultimately a fragmentation of the urban realm into radically disparate built environments. Architects and urbanists, in turn, have largely been reluctant to directly engage the larger social, political, and even urbanistic impor t of the various smart city proposals they have taken par t in, instead retreating into a staid reiteration of normative models developed elsewhere in the world—remaining calculatedly a-political and a-geographic behind a disengaged facade of ‘world class’, ‘best practices,’ and ‘sustainable development.’ Lost in the process is a chance to deeply and critically engage the ideologies and practices of Smar t Cities—a chance to remake them from within.

Topological models of urbanization centralized, decentralized, distributed, corridor, and composite

Toward a Convivial Smart City In any case, the socio-spatial repercussions of bypass urbanism form a challenging new context for architects, urbanists, and policymakers alike—most of all for those engaged with questions of ethics, equality, and social justice. How else might the Smart City take form, beyond peripheral zones and exclusive enclaves? Who drives this formation, and in what ways might it grow from the desires of a more inclusive set of actors? What is the role of outside (i.e. non-Indian or Western) expertise in this formation? Furthermore, how might the agency of architectural representation go beyond its current role as a banal tool to entice real-estate investment capital—perhaps, even, acting as a critical and speculative vehicle by which an optimistic version of the Smart City might come to exist? Ultimately, how might architects—in their unique roles as mediating agents in the production of urban space—come to project alternative futures for the Smart City? Can these alternative futures be con-vivial in the sense of the etymological root of the word—that is, drawn from a renewed conception of living-with? In place of the familiar model of top-down, Big Data-driven, bureaucratic-cybernetic management fantasies expanded to an urban scale, the Smar t City could be re-conceived as an emergent product of everyday behaviors— reflexively and incrementally aggregating throughout the city to bring new networks into being, and doing so in a way that is radically open. In the process, Smar t Cities can become a cipher for our understandings of the city itself, calling upon us to offer new models for what the city can be.

Control, Agency, and the Late Modernist City Underlying both the aforementioned ‘smar t’ urbanisms and contemporary debates in architecture are a series of profound questions around control and agency, particularly as they have come to operate in ‘open,’ distributed systems—in other words, how control is exer ted infrastructurally. In response, the studio examines the conceptual and operational shifts that are occurring as architects increasingly take systems as the object of design—a shift from conceiving of architects as authors of discrete built objects to instead conceptualizing design in terms of the management of increasingly complex processes. Fundamental to this shift is the emergence of new understandings of control and order that depart fundamentally from the paradigm of mastery that typified High Modernism. These new attitudes toward control and intervention—prizing indirectness over directness, operating on a substrate rather than directly on subjects, and extending control from space to time— have recently been termed managerialism, or, following the late writings of Deleuze, modulation. While their application in ‘smart’ rhetoric is clear, within architectural theory this sensibility is less obvious—typically taking root within theories of ‘openness’ and ‘flexibility’. In this role, it acts as a way to provide control with a friendly, non-Modernist face while providing so-called ‘openness’ with a strong yet sly set of ordering mechanisms. Despite its many avatars growing to dominate architectural theory over the past two-plus decades, the logic of modulation itself remains peculiarly under-theorized, largely disconnected both from parallel developments in philosophy and the spread of homologous models of control in society. In turn, it often vacillates between its two extremes: on one hand, a fastidious neo-Modernism masquerading behind a thin veil of ‘openness;’ on the other, reductionistic calls for ‘flexibility’ that too often reduce architecture to a miserly blankness. The studio takes as its conceptual core a questioning and examination of this tendency. In what ways might working in these sorts of generalized, rule-based approaches extend the reach of the designer? How might the design process be opened other agents, allowing them to participate in a coproduction of space over time? Or does such an approach merely feed into precarity, paradoxically reinforcing the tendencies it hopes to counter? Is this sort of approach an abdication of the responsibility of the designer to create specific, generous forms? After all, where better to ask such questions around mastery, authorship, agency, and precarity than in Chandigarh—notionally the city of the so-called ‘Master’ himself, and in reality a fascinating, hybrid urbanism.

Discreteness and the Grid Burail village, Chandigarh

Chandigarh: Core and Periphery In this context, Chandigarh is an ideal site from which to study these emergent urban patterns and the ways in which the Smar t Cities initiative might take form. It both acts as a zone and plays host to its own periurban zones; it both came into being as a New Town and now has its own New Towns in miniature; it both ser ved as an avatar of progressive urbanism and presently acts as a par ticipant in the Smar t Cities program. It ser ves as a bridge between a par ticular, fascinating moment in the histor y of Indian urbanism; its present, hybrid state; and the genetically-related future developments throughout India. In the form and histor y of Chandigarh are condensed many of the issues which current and future Smar t Cities developments must face—and as such, it ser ves as a useful proxy of contemporar y Indian urbanism and its dynamics. Born whole-cloth as a new town, Chandigarh can be seen as a direct precursor to many of the Smar t Cities’ (peri-)urban development proposals and their emphasis on zone-based models. In its initial conception as an administrative capital, the city bears a distinct resemblance to the contemporary era’s various Knowledge Cities, Cyber Cities, Medi-Cities, Tourism Cities, and so on. In Chandigarh, however, this mono-functional emphasis began to fade and be ‘contaminated’ when met with the realities of a democratic country with free mobility. As such, the progressive diversification and adaptation of Chandigarh’s initial plan can serve as a precedent for a future hybridization of the current zone-cities.

Likewise, Chandigarh is also presently site to intense periurban development and hosts a number of zones—not only formal, administered zones of exception like the technology parks and rehabilitation colonies in its periphery, but also quasi-formal zones (like Burail, a village swallowed by the city yet still partially autonomous from it) and informal zones (like the many settlements that dot its margins and interstices). While under the Chandigarh Periphery Control Act of 1952, an area extending to ten miles around Chandigarh was to be heavily regulated to preserve Chandigarh’s identity and purity, today that area is “chaotic, hybrid, liminal, disorderly and diverse”1 and contains a multitude of functions. The relationship between these zones and the city is a dialectical one, with activities and bodies that are ‘written out’ of the city finding space in its margins. To probe this dynamic, the studio examines the history and development of the periphery, reading it through the interplay between the city’s rules and the exceptions that they generate—and in turn, how that dynamic plays out in urban space and architectural form. The driving conceit is that the periphery acts as a cipher for the (formal) city, both in the case of Chandigarh and in future Smart Cities proposals. In these ways, Chandigarh can be seen as both precursor and exemplar—both prefiguring the Smart City model of urbanism and participating in it. As such, it serves as a particularly fertile ground for design research and speculation. The studio focuses on Vikas Marg— ’progress/development street’—the road on Chandigarh’s southernmost periphery, the seam between Chandigarh and its satellite city Mohali, and a targeted site for Smart Cities investment.

02_ CONCEPTUAL RESEARCH

new territorial forms of the city Gabriel Lacombe FĂŠlix Lavergne Blaire Schille

The first research cluster focuses on identifying and documenting novel urban and spatial conditions nascent in India, along with the related socioeconomic phenomena that contribute to their emergence. This implies a focus on urban form, documenting the ways in which both Western historical models like the polis and contemporary models such as the mega-city, global city, or slum tend to be insufficient when considering these emerging urban morphologies. Likewise, it implies attention to processes of urban formationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the sociological and economic drivers of these new patterns of urbanismâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;tracing the major national and transnational actors (economic, political, technological, and more) in these networks.

Planetary Urbanization: A Global Economy Of Power As mentioned by Henri Lefebvre, the generalization of capitalist urbanization—which characterizes the world we live in right now—is the result of what he calls an implosionexplosion process. The implosion represents the destruction of the European mercantile cities that used to dominate the globe, while the explosion is the subsequent growth of megalopolitan territorial formations in order to support industrialization.1

“the city is everywhere and in everything” - Jean Gottman

Global Economic Powerhouses System

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lefebvre expands his uses of the implosion-explosion metaphor [...] as cities are expanding outwards into their surrounding territories and are woven together via thickening long-distance logistics networks.â&#x20AC;?1

main actors secondary actors political hub economic hub projection of the center North American Megalopolis Redrawn from Brenner, N. Implosions / Explosions : Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. p17.

A Problem / Opportunity Of Numbers As neoliberal technocrats like McKinsey & Co. see it, India’s strength exists in its numbers. While other countries are seeing the increase in dependency ratios that accompanies aging populations, India’s young, rapidly growing population holds the potential for a massive GDP increase—at least, they argue, given a particular suite of infrastructure and policies. India’s urban population increased by an estimated 50 million in just seven years and is projected to increase by another 250 million by 2030. Its current cities lack adequate infrastructure to sustain such growth and, as such, migration has resulted in inadequately-provisioned slum dwellings in the urban frontier. As McKinsey sees it, what they call the ‘current policy vacuum’ threatens prospective growth through lack of infrastructure, declining quality of life for a growing population, and creating unease among would-be foreign investors. In response, they propose a reorientation of policy around a decentralization of urbanization. This decentralization shifts focus from the megacentres to the development of secondary and tertiary centres. Likewise, it takes as its core the development of new ‘integrated townships’ on the peripheries of, and on corridors between, existing cities. “Some 75 percent of urban citizens live in the bottom income segments, earning an average of 80 rupees a day. Addressing life in India’s cities is clearly not an elitist endeavor but rather a central pillar of inclusive growth.”2 - McKinsey, “India’s Urban Awakening”

frontier

slum

existing city

infrastructure

slum

new city

Control of Rural Exodus Investing in the creation of new cities

frontier

Nuclear vs. Poly-nuclear Urbanization Delhi / Punjab

Nuclear Mega-city Delhi seen at 100m - Image: Google Earth

Poly-nuclear City Pattern Punjab Province seen at 100m - Image: Google Earth

Existing Condition: Infrastructure & Industrial Areas Data extracted from the DMICDC website

The DMIC Corridor Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s extensive freight transport network mainly consists of national highways and federal railways. The limited capacity of the network results in a bottleneck, restricting freight transit volume and reducing speed between industrial areas, the cities and the shipping facilities. Furthermore, as the biggest cities struggle with infrastructure deficiencies to address the everincreasing number of migrants, the concentration of workforce away from industrial areas contributes to an uncapitalized production potential that drags down the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s competitive advantage on international markets.

Existing Network

Projected Railway Infrastructure Data extracted from the DMICDC website

The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) is a multi-modal, high axle load dedicated freight corridor that passes through six states (Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and NCR Delhi) and links mega-cities Delhi and Mumbai. Its main objective is to optimize the industrial and economic potential of the region by infusing money in transpor t infrastructure to attract foreign investments. 3

Implementation of A Dedicated Freight Train Corridor

Existing Network of Federal Railways Data extracted from the DMICDC website

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The major missing link of these industrial estates is transportation-logistics, industrial and social infrastructure to facilitate the exports of the output.â&#x20AC;? 3 -DMIC Project Brief

Anchoring the Project to the Existing Railway System

System Junctions Data extracted from the DMICDC website

The DMIC aims to address the multi-dimensional problem by “proposing highimpact nodes to provide efficient investment-friendly policies under which investment regions and industrial areas will be developed. These investment regions and industrial areas will be developed with self-sustainable infrastructure and world class facilities in terms of transpor t and social infrastructure. The connectivity will be well developed with road and rail connectivity for freight movement including logistic hubs, airpor ts and por ts.” “[...] this appears as one component of an elaborated ecology of interests, involving state and non-state actors both domestic and foreign, and at range of scales from the center down to the ward and even to the individual households within the ward. [...] one may understand this [type of urbanization] as an integrated, though highly segmented, system arising from a coalescence of state and non-state interests and with the involvement of foreign capital at various level of scale.”4 - Michael Leaf

Creation of A Multi-Nodal System

Special Investment Regions Data extracted from the DMICDC website

“Enables the State Government to establish, develop, operate and regulate the Special Investment Regions (SIR).” “An Investment Region will have as area of more than 100 sq. Kms and an Industrial Area will have an area of more than 50 sq. Kms”5 - SIR Act 2009

Creation of Special Investment Regions

Ahmedabad

Bhimnat 8a

Khambat

SIR

Dholera

Dahej

The Dholera SIR - Infrastructures Network Extracted from the DSIRDA Final Plan6

Vadodara

The Case of Dholera Special Investment Region (SIR) “The DSIR covers 920 sq. kms and encompasses 22 villages of Ahmedabad District making it the largest of the investment nodes proposed so far in the DMIC influence region.”6 - DSIRDA Final Development Plan

National Highway DMIC Broad Gauge Railway (PPP) Metro Lane

SIR

Special Investment Region Shipping Port International Airport City

dsirda boundary city centre residential high access corridor industrial tourism knowledge + IT city centre village buffer existing village settlement recreation sports + entertainment tourism

DSIRDA Plan Extracted from the DSIRDA Final Plan6

existing village settlement village buffer

Existing Settlements and Projected Buffer Zones Extracted from the DSIRDA Final Plan6

36 Indicative Phasing of the Major Infrastructure Elements

INFRASTRUCTURE

PHASE 1 PHASE 1A

PHASE 1B

2010-2015

2015-2020

PHASE 2

PHASE 3

2020-2030

2030-2040

Land under Urban Uses (ha) (Cumulative)

11,505

23,549

33,846

Population (Cumulative)

500,000

1,450,000

2,000,000

Dwellings (Cumulative)

125,000

362,500

500,000

Indicative Phasing of Population and Dwellings Extracted from the DSIRDA Final Plan6

Water Body (3%) Residential (11%)

Industrial (12%) CRZ (37%)

Road and Rail (12%) Existing Village Settlements (0%) High Access Corridor (3%) Knowledge and IT (1%) City Center (1%) Recreational Sports and Entertainment (5%) Public Facility Zone (1%) Strategic Infrastructure (0%) Solor Energy Park (1%) Tourism (4%) Agriculture (14%)

Green Belt (2%) Village Buffer (1%)

Dholera SIR Land Use Summary Extracted from the DSIRDA Final Plan6

Works Cited 1. Brenner, N. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Berlin: Jovis, 2014). 2. Sankhe, Shirish, Ireena Vittal, Richard Dobbs, Ajit Mohan, and Ankur Gulati. India’s urban awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth. (2010) 3. Ghosh, Swarnabh. “DMIC”. Web. http://extrastatecraft.net/ Projects/DMIC/ 4. Leaf, Michael. “New Urban Frontiers: Periurbanization and (Re)territorialization in Southeast Asia” (2013). 5. Legal Framework. “SIR Act 2009”, Gujarat Infrastructure Development Board, n.d. Web. http://www.gidb.org/cms. aspx?content_id=95 6. Dholera Special Investment Region Development Authority. “Final Development Plan - DSIRDA - Report 1.” (2012)

THE SOCIAL LANDSCAPE OF Bypass URBANISM Patrick Birch Tori Hamatani Pera Hardy

Focused on the notion of Bypass Urbanism, the second research cluster takes a more explicitly political and sociocultural approach to the aforementioned urban form and trendsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;reading them through the lens of urban fragmentation. In India as in much of the developing world, the dramatic cultural changes prompted by integration into a global market tend to play out through an intense division and demarcation of urban spaceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in turn raising questions of environmental justice and (in)equality of access to infrastructure. Running through this topic is the question of politics and governance: if these urban forms tend to operate outside the traditional patterns of democratic participation and administration, what might this imply for citizenship and socio-spatial justice?

1960

1991

2008

2030

Rural Population %

Urban Population %

Rural to urban migration The restructuring of the Indian population (McKinsey, 15)

â&#x20AC;&#x153;In this new, more aesthetic framework, the law crafts fields of intelligibility by disseminating standardized aesthetic norms. Spaces are known to be illegal or legal, deficient or normal, based on their outer characteristics.â&#x20AC;? (Ghertner, 288)

Material Labour (dirty jobs, unsanctioned industry)

New Eco-cities (world-class, planned, legal)

Policy (immaterial labour, clean jobs)

Informal Settlement (unplanned, illegal)

Land Acquisition (displacement, rehabilitation)

Material Labour (Rural)

Immaterial Labour (Urban)

Economic Topography Rural to urban transition in labour typologies

Global Connectivity Alignment with global economy over national economy (Bhattacharya and Sanyal, 43)

golden quadrilateral city international airport cellphone data coverage flight path railway major highway golden quadrilateral highway

Golden Quadrilateral + Major Highways Connecting major agricultural, industrial and cultural centres: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata + Chennai

golden quadrilateral city international airport cellphone data coverage flight path railway major highway golden quadrilateral highway

Important Railway Lines Passenger and freight

golden quadrilateral city international airport cellphone data coverage flight path railway major highway golden quadrilateral highway

Domestic Flight Paths Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata + Chennai

golden quadrilateral city international airport cellphone data coverage flight path railway major highway golden quadrilateral highway

Locations of International Airports The Mumbai + Delhi airports handling most of the South Asian international traffic.

golden quadrilateral city international airport cellphone data coverage flight path railway major highway golden quadrilateral highway

Cell Phone Coverage â&#x20AC;&#x153;beneath the rhetoric that the internet is some egalitarian and democratic space, profound inequalities are being subtly and invisibly integrated into the very protocols that make it functionâ&#x20AC;?1

below 100 100 - 250 250 - 500 500 - 1000 1000 - 2000 above 2000 persons per 1km

Population Density “all these [infrastructural] ‘scapes’ are not autonomous, they rely on each other and co-evolve closely in their interrelationships and with urban development and urban space”2

“The construction of spaces of mobility and flow for some, however, always involves the construction of barriers for others. Experiences of infrastructure are therefore highly contingent.” (Graham, 11)

“Our native vernacular genius will corrupt the imported model of the post-industrial city and turn it into an impure, inefficient, but ultimately less malevolent hybrid.” (Nandy, Ashis, paraphrased in Chatterjee, 2004: 14)

global agent: bypass:

Internet providers Prioritizing Internet access to preferred clients